


wild open

by meatmarket



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spies & Secret Agents, thank u Sam Mendes for the best motion picture of 2012
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 08:56:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17261303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meatmarket/pseuds/meatmarket
Summary: The fact of the matter is, for all Ten cares, Q could dissect him down the middle for entertainment if he so pleased, or chase after whatever soft underbelly he believed he still had, as had on occasion happened before.He is so very curious what Q will do when he doesn’t find it.





	wild open

**Author's Note:**

> what is up, pests. meet [0010](https://66.media.tumblr.com/d03ebac345a24d6aa90c30d16e394392/tumblr_pkaaloYS2T1rdjv96_1280.jpg) & [Q](https://cdn2.vyrl.com/vyrl/images/post/_temp/124647/016aa1afff9b4e56385916e960b0bf8b.jpg), cheers

“Raise your arms,” someone he’s never met says. “Higher. Both of them. Higher.”

“Sorry,” says Ten, “it’s the stab wound.”

“Higher.”

Wrists given up level with his nose like he got bored with surrender, Ten watches the guy he’s never met’s shirt. It gets stretchier because he moves. In the ugly temperature, his nipples cut through.

“Bit skinny for a,” Ten mutters under his visible breath. “What do they call you.”

Guy’s poky lower lip gets pokier with the nudge from his jaw, and doesn’t he just keep evolving on sight.

“Down.”

“Would you mind?”

“It’s the stab wound?” guy guesses,  _Being a bitch?_  mocks his cut-glass peek of teeth, and not that Ten’s in a hurry to sugarcoat wanting to prolong his first human contact in weeks.

Metaphysically, it doesn’t feel like anything. Cold. Hands. Nobody’s, too. The guy palms a raw pressure over the bandaged ache of Ten’s shoulder blade. Makes it better then worse, and Ten in turn puts his arms down as if he couldn’t have solo.

But something’s off.

It’s always something, and he’s been noticing these somethings increasingly and when they don’t manifest to him, he looks for them.

This guy’s face is all wrong, the no-frill but pleasant whatever angles of it. Even though his eyes are too small to be, it reminds Ten so dizzyingly, and it hurts through him like a wire.

He looks as away as this dusty dungeon slaves rectangular, inhaling old skin flakes. The walls are cracked in lightnings. One of them’s got a white toothpaste filling of spiderweb running halfway up its edge like glue.  

“What  _do_  they call you, dammit.”

“Jung,” 004 calls from his sheathed corner, and Ten blinks. He hasn’t registered him as a component of his surroundings all this time, and even blind, he should have.

004 in suits is a linchpin to centre the world; he makes them look good and he struggled his way out of the womb in cufflinks.

When he chats Jung up next to the controllers, stepped in necklong to attempt discreet and looking like a handsome infant, Ten is in goosebumps.

Tubed about the torso, cross-chest, and under one armpit like a rucksack, he feels every bit the dead body he’s trying to bring back. Barefoot, he pads and his toes fatten on each step. They suck up filth and chalk dust, tattooing prints across the mat under Jung’s corner-of-the-eye chaperoning.

The headache fluorescents buzz, spitting dull saliva glow on the mat’s wrinkled leather, on the mat’s hangnailed corners, and Ten makes it onto the treadmill.

“Mark,” Ten says by the way. Noses at the oxygen mask before he gets it right. Watches his breath gentle fog to its insides.

“Ten.”

“You know what,” Ten works up an angry stride to Jung’s bump-up of the speed. “Tell me how bored you’ve been without me.”

“I, for one, have been having to cover your shifts,” Mark says. “You can imagine.”

“Terribly, then?”    

Grabbing for the noose of his shiny liver tie, Mark unhangs himself and peels just enough collar from around his Adam’s apple. Polite to viewing pleasures, he comes closer. Periphery throws a baby pink bullet graze into relief, layered like wax.

If not for the hairballs down his windpipe, if not for being busy, Ten would tease. He almost trips his cartilage open, and his feet scramble and stop-start and tap-dance around it, neck stiffening as if countergravity’s biting him upright by the scruff. His breath unhitches. His shins  _feel_.

Thud thud thud thud and thus—

“Try to keep your breathing down.”

He eyes Jung.

His movement defers only to Ten’s handheld runner’s perspective as he chases flight. Like this, his blood has flowed feeling back, and he’s aware of having fingers again. The muzzled warmth over his mouth could be a big hand, and Ten’s glad for keeping watch when, breath-deaf, he sees the speed being dialled up a notch.

A notch more.

Several more notches, stacking a pyramid of boiling points.

He thinks that, and his stab wound starts talking pretty loudly.

“Care to”—he encompasses the fact of the matter with a hand flick—“indulge me?”

Creeping sideways, Mark leads Ten to realise Jung as the reason. Or Jung as the consultant for it; Ten is presently countries from caring about what his official ranking permits him and not.

When he’s got a hot cord through each calf and Jung’s tepid appraisal vacates with the intel, he steps down to under Mark’s height.

“Something smells bad,” Ten says and teases off one of the adhesive suckers hickeying his pec. “Why are we in a decrepit morgue?”

“It’s been like this since you left. Pretty much. Seo oversaw the transfer, made sure we took no chances with who we took with us.”

“Someone cracked us.”

“Someone cracked us. But we don’t know how they got through our firewall.”

Ten stares. “It was a cyberattack.” His inhales are swallowed knives. Something fresh is weeping down his side.

“That’s the annoying part. Ever since then, the new Q’s had to play cat-and-mouse.”

And now they’ve been forced underground like sewer rats.

“So what does M want from me?”  

“More on that from M,” Mark says.

If Ten could roll his eyes illustriously enough.

 

* * *

 

His shootings go horribly. 

 

* * *

 

This room is a fridge or a podium, and he’s shelved like a sausage on the next-up rack, the one closest to sniffing noses.

The chair on the other side of the table whines away on the stone ground, then closer.

“I’m told we’ll be meeting more often,” Qian says.

Qian is a decent lay, Ten remembers, if controlled. He’s milky and enveloping and doesn’t let go of the littlest of things. Some people leave such an aftertaste. Even now, Ten feels him in his mouth.

Always allergic to non-feedback, Qian tries, “Everyone needs someone to talk to.”

Yes, Qian would call psych eval that.

“Just get this over with, I’ll be late for lunch.”

The faulty light is a humming wasp slung lazily low, lolling like a sampling tongue, bouncing shadowplay off of Qian’s sanded forehead.

“We’ll play a simple word association game. You like a good game.”

He watches Ten. It’d be a current skin-prickingly familiar if not for however many others partaking from behind the tinted glass—or perhaps that’s why Ten is able to put a name to it.

“I give you a word, and you’ll give me—”

“Another.”

Consistent with his own image, Qian nods: “Like so. Mission.”

“Soon.”

“Knife.”

“Sharp.”

“Loyalty.”

“Circumstance.”

“Death.”

“Later.”

“Beer.”

“Cheap,” Ten says, and knows that deeper, in the matrix layers of bias that make up a person, Qian disagrees.

“Ten.”

“Number.”

“006.”

Impish, the bulb spits again, then settles.

The transient glow firing a gun lends has gone. Ten licks behind his front teeth and drags the motion. Farther back, his palate is tacky tape. Lower down, the grain at his molars says his morning brush deserves an encore.

And Qian repeats, “006,” as though the kid will hallucinate himself present.

Maybe that’s what they’re all wanting for from behind the glass, watching the insect theatre, for just a drop of insanity. M included.

Ten’s chair whines away on the stone ground, and he leaves it there. He leaves them all there.

 

  

Upon returning home to the stink of old beer and rancid armpit, he finds a twat sitting in his living room he can’t remember putting there. He’s got a headful of hair halfway bleached to hell and a calm that has no place in being caught.

“Oh. Hello.”

Ten flicks the safety of his gun off.

“0010,” the man—boy?—says, “I’m your new Quartermaster.” He folds his index finger once as though answering the door to his reverse burglar. “Pleasure.”

He can hear one of his valves pumping blood in his ear like something plucked from the beach and trapped in a conch.

“Christ.”

“You can call me Q.”

Ten says, “Oh, yes? The incompetent one.”

“Pardon?”

_I almost shot your bloody head off, idiot._

“Lee’s words,” Ten says, and Q narrows his eyes. This one seems a touch out of the reality loop for someone of his supposed capacity. “004. Aren’t you playing catch-up with our firewall mouse?”

“Whatever Mr. Lee told you—”

Ten snorts like a boar. “That’s the thing, isn’t it. He doesn’t know anything worth telling me.”

Much in the way of a test animation, Q slants his head and his blackhole eyes drop to Ten’s gun. He takes it as the cue to feel free to melt back down into Ten’s sofa, knees daggered out. He’s got skinny deer legs. Shoulders pulled and wide.

After a filler slice of benevolent silence, Q, somehow its benefactor who now  _grants_  things in Ten’s own home, says, “It’s a rat.”

It’s a rat? Ten’s mouth starts to say.

“Much too sloppy. Mice have a certain grace.”

All right.

“Why are you here?”

“Would you have preferred I’d taken the bedroom?”

Q’s bespectacled face is a perfectly pale hard-boiled egg, non-jiggly and unblinking, and he must be fucking with him.

“Why are you in my flat.”

“Our grounds have been compromised,” Q says, and Ten wants badly to pinch behind his neck, clean the bookshelf with his face, and keep on against the edge until he sees bone.

“Don’t we have new grounds.”

“One can never be too careful.”

And that’s it? No, that’s not it.

“You’ve made yourself tea.”

“Yes. Quite dreadful, but it did its job.”

“Q.”

“0010. On behalf of M, I am to reinstate you. Officially.”

“I thought I botched my shootings.”

“Your debriefing went wonderfully average. You passed by a hairsbreadth. Congratulations, 0010.”

The seconds hang. They emphasise Q in Ten’s space, pick him out like meat from teeth, and pile him under Ten’s nose.

At last he lowers his gun, and his arms thank him. He expects Q to comment on the half-alive takeaway styrofoams, or how he’d had to pretzel himself into the sole dimple inside of the slum of clothes to make use of the table crouched somewhere under its load.

Wild on unrest, Ten invites the invasion, and a fruit fly floats squarely into the eyeline of his goading. Q doesn’t seem to need to blink, and he wouldn’t rule out his being a reptile.

As if through wavy glass, he watches then hears Q clean up all traces of human after himself. The china set, a misgauged  _get better_  gift from M, laughs like a child from the sink when Q takes the spoon out of its fine mouth.

It’s been seven? Eight? Hours since his last meal.

When Q has one trainer out the door, Ten turns around.

“Wait.” Errand boy sounds well below a Quartermaster’s pay’s waistline.  “M sent you?”

“Goodnight, 0010. Thank you for the tea.”

  

 

This time, it’s a lung puncture.

006 is there. He’s sitting on Ten’s bed, his gun relaxed empty on the pillow. Mid-word, he heaves as though he has lung cancer and is in the unpleasant percolating stage of breathing water.

006 is in Ten’s arms, all elbows and shoulders. He coughs washy blood on Ten’s neck; it caresses down into his clavicle like saliva. The vessels in 006’s eyes have slicked over with dark veins strung on choked oxygen, and Ten is talking to him about the utmost importance of never, ever keeping your loaded gun in your bloody backpocket, you piece of…

He wakes up blank and tender, and he doesn’t get why.

He’s got a loudspeaker down his throat, alivealivealive, in his palms, deadeadead, something stinks. Something wholly attached to him. Feels like eczema, and his fingers skate on sweat and he scratches under his knee, scratches along his bicep, and in the isolated pocket of this while, he can’t scratch himself out.

Ten makes it to the sink and vomits.

 

* * *

  

By way of welcome, M hurls him into a job first thing.  

“Drug smugglers. Your favourite,” he says.

And that Ten is to meet their head trough of the financial sort and decapitate it so the forked tentacles rooted worldwide die with the Hydra, this time, if he would be so kind.  

“Why is it you’re so attached to me, I wonder,” Ten says. The family picture from the file stays unmoved by his rhetoric. He looks up at M. “Never pegged you as the overly sentimental type. Utilitarian at best.”

“Your flight departs in less than three hours. Best start finding your ass with both of your hands, 0010.”

“What do you want?”

Through the delicate glass wall, he clocks Mark politely biding his time on the fringe of waiting list decorum, but he’s got butter ears too clean and near not to catch a thing or two.

“I want you,” M says, dry, “to get the job done.”

Per instructions, Ten pit-stops at Q Branch.

He asks, “Where am I going?”

And Q informs, “Guangzhou. Lovely, this time of the year. Your wrist, please.”

“What, are you planning to chip me?”

By the raw confusion on Q’s face, you’d think he was old and Ten had knowingly faced him with technology.

“There are methods inordinately more superior—and efficient—to track you, 0010. Most of them involve leaving you none the wiser about it.”

Muscle memory tells Ten his facial geometry is arranging a smile.

Q fastens the faux-black diamond bracelet over his upturned pulse point, adjusting it to his taste next to the mole. Near it Ten’s vein branches into little twigs—they remind him of Q’s fingers fussing just above. They’re cold and so starved his nails almost look too big for them.    

He gets a new passport. He gets a fresh earpiece and contact lenses spruced up to pick up heat signatures.

Christmas, after all.

“Bring these back recognisable, will you.”

But Ten won’t be dismissed until he chooses to.

“Two nights ago,” he says slowly. “How did you get into my flat?”

Cadenced, Q’s plasticky typing pit-a-pats off. His jaw is cut impossibly by the vaulted monitor blue coalescing from his neighbours of lower ranks, and Ten is feeling quite disadvantaged, indeed. He threatens alerting the higher-ups of a little rogue operative breaking-and-entering places far beyond his field clearance.

“And how am I to know everything was left as it had been prior,” Ten adds.

This is the most outwardly disrupted Q has appeared. “You wouldn’t.”

“Oh,” says Ten, “I would.”

Unreceptive to his wall-sized flickering screen, Q briefly surveys around.

“I got inside because you’d let me in.”

“You let yourself in,” Ten corrects, not for the first time. Loose subjective definitions are only entertaining when they don’t pursue a crossover into his logic.

Q shrugs. It rustles like leaves. “Your paycheck affords for far better a location. A better  _lock_.”

“You’re suggesting I subconsciously—”

“I always have bobby pins on me,” Ten thinks Q says, but the vowels are shaven through his teeth.

Ten’s surprised gratification is quicker to swell outward than Q’s new colour.

“Now get out of my Branch. You’re haemorrhaging the traffic.”

 

 

The cityline bruises across the sky as prettily as Q promised.

“You’re not who I expected,” Ten says and unfurls a generous hand.

Who’s shown up instead is—

“The heir of.”

Jeon Junior’s handshake has the learnt grace that pushes grip from the palm instead of the thumb, like cradling a heart. That is his first mistake. That…

… would be a basic martini for him and, as he full-body turns to Ten, “For you?”

“Vodka.”

“On the rocks or straight?”

“Neat.”

The bartender looks bored to the point of killing himself.

“I like that,” Jeon commends a tad boisterous, finger jabbed out like they do in movie classics but awkward, which tells him it was adopted tooth-and-nail. Fathers tend to have that effect.

From his bar stool, Ten sizes him up: his blunt nose, a bloody nutcracker of a jaw. He’s got a pocketknife blade on Ten in height and lower lip the girth of his thumb pad. Their thighs touch all through Jeon comparing their piercings and ordering another round, and another, louder. And although he has the build of a lean tank, on the periphery, his burly clumps of security hold sentry like logs to a doorjamb.

Wired to the subject of their income, they dogtail at once as soon as Jeon twitches. Two fingers skyward like a laid-back gun, he motions for privacy, because he’d like to show Ten his wine cellar.

“Everything in this place is gold or marble,” he says once underground, and it’s the first hint of authenticity for miles, though Ten never minded. “But this… is a reprieve. Sometimes I just come down here.”

The bloated walls smell of plasteline and things that grow. Jeon’s shirt is crisp like bleached hair through Ten’s grip, the buttons cold and fluid, and he expects to be fucked. After all, he had his suit pressed.

As it is, Jeon expects the same. It takes a fumble and a laugh, but the ducked head comes across.

Mid-fuck, eased snug inside, Ten almost drops his gusto when the grit of Q’s voice funnels in through his earpiece. And what a doll he is, starched in his delivery of vital escape information of which Ten retains no more than a third.

He licks cologne off the back of Jeon’s hot neck and comes while Q talks technicalities and timing.

 _“Well,”_  Q says after an odd pause.  _“Be a gentleman.”_

“He doesn’t want to,” Ten says, saturated through his trembling breath. He backknuckles the wet along his lip off.

 _“What?”_  Q asks.

“What?” Jeon fifes, and his hips hitch so lively Ten can touch the firing nerve endings’ crackle.

“He doesn’t want to come,” he tells Q. “You don’t, do you?”

Jeon Senior raised himself a little freak to take over his white powder empire.

Jeon Junior’s talking condition is sticky enough that he glosses over when and how this evolved into a threeway. Ah… no. Just to help zip him up.

From behind, Ten peels off the condom and huddles acquaintedly for a hearty grope toward Jeon’s fly. Shadowed like this, Jeon tries hard to even out his breathing when it expands him into a barrel. He looks down at Ten’s fingers. The translucent crumple stuck to his shoulders shifts, and they tango.

Jeon mouses for the handgun strapped to his wasp waist, jerking from inside the duct tape of Ten’s crosslocking arms.

Like sprung rubber band, Jeon snaps his head back. Ten bites his tongue open. The electric frizz through his jaw thins his vision from the margins in. For a stunning second, he unclasps his cuddle and nearly doesn’t make it sleazy fast enough.

_“0010, you’ll be late for your train. Again.”_

“Bit busy, Q!”

Jeon uses his mass, all animal. Kicking off the wall of Pinots, he boulders back, and Ten keychains with him like nothing, sliding loose a domino xylophone of wine bottles.

Their joint spider steps slap and crunch, grit in place.

Cutting off sounds, stiff in the neck, Jeon hunches as if being fucked again. He makes to sidestep and slips on glass. With him, Ten squats lower in the knees. Good. He starts cresting Jeon in the exaggerated direction of a spine, against the weight of his given body. Better. Its suddenness stretches him backward like a broken-in pointe shoe.

Ten is tasting pennies and exhaling them behind Jeon’s ear, where it still smells of mouth and old intimacy. Twitching with it, he breathes step-by-step. Crawls a hand over Jeon’s jaw and feels spit, with the other sweetly cushioning the back of his skull.

Ten seizes and twists his chin up and sideways on second try like a knuckle cracking. The head rebounds. The strings cut. Jeon’s paralysed limbs sigh deep, oozing long, longer, warmer, into a leaden blanket.

That’s when his schmucks sweep in.

 

  

He doesn’t report to M for three days.

On the fourth, an impressively steady infection forces him to reconsider. Under his right rib, there are piranha teeth in the shape of a broken wine bottle, bled through with pus like severe morning shave nicks. As a side dish to that, the stitches paralleling his scapula no longer look like stitches, and one of those is enough of a handful for someone with three broken fingers.

For the first time in years, he takes the Tube to work.

“Jesus,” Q says when he sees him, and forgets to woodpeck away at his poor keyboard. That thing must be made of something durable.

Ten’s bad hand is in tremors.

“Flattered.”

“For fuck’s sake, 0010. Are you mad?”

From two rows down, Kim aims them a quaint look.

What he assumes Q had been programming is a landslide mess of wet-finish metal and wire, the variant he’d get hell for dropping in one of the oceans by high-stakes accident, sat on a scraggy blueprint. A mug stain is playing peekaboo like a cheeky stuck-out tongue. It whiffs of fish oil enough for Ten to angle his sinuses.

“I brought you this.”

Jeon’s phone is pulp, but Q’s nifty bracelet, which he forwards along the steel table, decrypted most of its meet-and-greets for the following month. That’s the mark at which coincidence becomes suspicion.

_May I interest you in some free cartel agenda?_

“Oh,” Q says, hesitant, and instantly Ten tears wide awake through his painkillers, eating it up. “Shouldn’t… you get that checked by a professional?”

“Probably.”

“M isn’t pleased.”

“Is he ever.”   

“Off with you,” Q mutters almost fondly and pointedly ignores him for work.

Jung fixes him up and fixes his fingers in a triple splint.

“My little brother used to push his luck like this,” he says, gentling against Ten’s wrist for the mobility status. His skin doesn’t see much sun, it seems. The kind of medical he smells of comes from swimming laps. “Little shit.”

Straightening into soreness, Ten rotates his shoulders and unbuttons his shirt so Jung can get to the jam congealed in his unlacing back.

“He a swimmer as well?” Ten asks.

And how come he’s never noticed? Q smells like strawberry tea.

 

* * *

 

It’s bad form for his job description, not killing habits before they grow arms and legs, and he doesn’t mean to make it one.

“What is this?”

But Q ingests nothing but mud water. And he’s just—

“Skin and bones,” Ten says.

“This is… greasy.”

“You’re welcome.”

“No, it’s  _greasy_   _near the circuits_.”

It poses no issue, any of this.

  

* * *

 

It poses the slightest fraction of a potential issue once Ten’s nature catches up with himself and, after a rather drawn-out extraction in Lithuania, he makes a competition of evening out the playing field.

Seo flushes the idea down the shitter, but Ten has been getting around since before Seo crumbled off and worked his way up from MI6’s paperboy microflora.  

Q’s name is Taeyong. Taeyong is a mere five years younger than him. Still. When he had been source-linking arms dealings in Cuba, the only Q Taeyong knew was the cafeteria one.

Still. He offers to take Q home after a particularly strained night and is surprised when that works.

Really, it isn’t an issue until, “How in the hell do you know where I live?”

“Oh. Does your privacy feel violated?”

That puts a sock in Q’s mouth.

The fact of the matter is, for all Ten cares, Q could dissect him down the middle for entertainment if he so pleased, or chase after whatever soft underbelly he believed he still had, as had on occasion happened before.

He is so very curious what Q will do when he doesn’t find it.

Ten asks, “Are you not going to invite me up?”

Up into that arched brick dropped at random in this neighbourhood, with its hypopigmented, stubby railing.

“What for? To do things grown-ups do?”

“I could make you tea, after,” says Ten.

“Is that your idea of romance?”

Stalling. Ten angles his chin. “Expecting a guest?”

Q is above answering, it seems, and Ten is cooking in his skin. The milk film of insomnia tugs petulant around his eyes and tugs there tight, up to his hairline. The door clicks open. Waterfall rush statics in through its gap.

“Thank you for the lift. Drive sane.”

The door shuts. Q jogs through the pelting shower outside, hair mopping flat to his skull, the skinniest dog on the street. There’s an umbrella in Ten’s trunk. Until Q sleight-of-hands the lock open, he watches him in the dispersed lamplight.  

 

* * *

 

He paces and thinks about all the things he was coached out of. Things that he sometimes wakes up desperately wanting to access.

He rings Mark, but that bastard is out of the country.

 

* * *

 

“Have dinner with me,” Ten huffs when he’s being shot at.

 _“This is_ not _a private server,”_  Kim says.

 

* * *

  

He looks like Ten’d flay the flesh of him off in one downward swipe of teeth. He looks, well—

“Ravishing,” Ten says, seating himself under the moody candlelight and into its ambient plushness.

Their table is a bride in swathes of white, pearling in the folds pinned like upturned mouths or swan wings. It swallows Ten’s knees.

“Save it,” Q says, lukewarm.

“I mean it. I feel gravely underdressed.”

Q sighs. “Hors d’oeuvres?”

“Please.”

In-between waiting clinks and serviette unwrappings, the wasp buzz gabble they could just about eavesdrop, they tangle their words together. Q has fish, and Ten has actual meat. Q tells him he has a cat. Q throws him glances and stares, and eats his and Ten’s weight both in what should be a medically unsound fashion.

“Where does all of that go?” Ten asks, having charmed the waitress into free pre-dessert nibbles. (“You can afford it,” Q accused.) 

The tips of his teeth glossed, Q rinses his palate with sparkling water and licks as though it has a taste. His dress shirt is vague. His glasses have a new frame.

“What do you want from me?” Ten asks him because he can’t fathom and is done going cross-eyed trying to.

As always, and it rushes something heady all the way to his fingertips, Q senses what he means.

“Nothing.”    

“Nothing,” he parrots.

Looking at Q’s strange mouth shaped like a kiss, the lovely, lovely downswoop of his nose, it occurs to him he hasn’t even properly touched him yet. He wants to.

“Not your time nor commitment,” Q says, inspecting his neck. What Ten is swallowing down he’s nigh-amused to find isn’t being unburdened. “Well. Maybe I’ll have this—crème brûlée, but I don’t expect, that would be unwise. You understand.”

He says that, water-level over his menu and the brochure sticking out, but every bit of him insinuates he’s challenging Ten to contradict him.

“I do,” Ten says. “How do you feel about wine tasting?”

 

 

“One of your more shit ideas,” Q reports, thinking on his seaboat walking. “Which makes it…” 

“Just about average?” Ten believes. 

“I feel like a calm balloon.” 

Q see-saws with the wind and to his hiccuping unsatisfaction questions why Ten does not.

“Don’t be absurd, I graduated from this sort of thing. Summa cum laude.” 

Groaning, Q discovers a trash bin next to which to fold over like a textbook, palms to knees and interested in pavement. He laughs from the tips of his toes hard and keeps at his rubber bend until Ten thinks he’s engaged in stationary curfew.

But Q simply irons himself back up, puffing with a world-weary sigh.  

Rarely does he weigh his mistakes more than passing fancies or segregate them as such. He misses a step, he moves on.

He can’t quite move on from this one, by the bus stop. 

Cowlicked by shadow, Q is achingly soulful in the glitch of the moving ad, and Ten doesn’t look too into it nor accept it, just steps into the cloudy breath of mulberry wine already rotting in Q’s mouth. His stomach is wrung when Q paws him by the chin, lazy to lower. They kiss until he’s thinning Q’s fleshy lip with his teeth, and the world doesn’t end, but he’s waiting on it.

 

* * *

 

It’s a deceptively sunny November afternoon, so naturally, he’s jettisoned to Bahrain. 

“They’ve got 004,” M said. 

“They’ve got him,” Ten said right back.

“So to speak. Either he’s been put under surveillance and stopped reporting, or it was a pre-emptive course of action. But when I say neither is  _good_ ,” then neither was good. 

He’ll look more like Mark than anyone within a reasonable radius. He’ll have to work brisk.

After day three of not hearing from Q, as many as he hasn’t washed his face in, he forgets his earpiece.

He forgets it so solemnly he says what he thinks the damned moment Q comes back online.

“You are late.”

_“And you’re two seconds away from hypervitaminosis.”_

“Hopefully it’s not fatal,” Ten says, slicing a slick left. “Tell me what you see.”

_“There’s a construction site about 500 metres ahead, it cuts off the road. Disregard it.”_

So Ten does. He snakes under its pretend-shell, and the roof of his borrowed ride nearly regrets meeting him under these scalping circumstances. Chewing gravel, Ten meanders in the tracks of a bushy forest road until it balds into an overgrown building complex, nonchalant like a panther.

Not a word of their snogging. Perhaps that’s Q’s idea of romance.

Ten remembers it fondly, and has, multiple times since. Straitjacketed by his suit, he levers his knees wider apart.

_“I’ve seen your blood tests. Doping yourself on supplements won’t have the effect you’re hoping for.”_

“Hope is a strong word—”

_“Just lay off the zinc and the iron and the selenium.”_

“—I maintain a healthy balanced diet—”

 _“How are the nightmares?”_  Q asks at a turnaround, and he doesn’t sound malicious, never quite, only clinical and non-charged, neat as a pin. Ten nearly wraps the SUV around a tree trunk all the same.

The engine and the tyres comm through, so Q must know the signal isn’t passing a dead zone.

“You tell me, Q,” Ten says. In the rearview mirror, the mushroomed suburbs suck into shrubs and dwarf to nothing. “How is the estrangement from your family treating you?”

An educated guess, that, but now, Q’s reciprocal silence makes it a bullseye.

It’s unclear to Ten when it was they graduated to the territory where he should start reminding himself to be kind, or be expected to want to. But they’re there, and the knowledge sits so ill under his skin, he nearly backtalks into a cloud of sugar.

“I’m in,” Ten says when the lacquer of wrought iron gates bulges its teeth against his headlights, and shuts off the transmission.

 

 

It is common knowledge no cover established in three days is likely to hold snugly. 

That’s precisely what Ten does.

There’s a social affair on the 30th storey he mixes in, with finely-carved coconut flesh for shot glasses. He capsizes two of those on growling stomach and eats them as well, for good measure and safety protocol. In the heartbeat throb suspension of boxed-in music, Ten’s craving for people catches up and flivvers.

Sweating through his blouse, he tangles with a body. He thinks about knobby knuckles and all their bloody inconvenience when he’s hard at work.

 

 

He locates Mark. He locates the targets locating Mark.

Down in the garage, the underground mole palace where the gummy stink of toasted tyres stings his eyes wet, the footchase devolves personal. The couple of weeks away from light exercise his fingers are get cocked when he punches. It snaps like crisp wishbone, but only the once. The splint doesn’t want to go and clings when he peels it off.

In the close quarters, Ten makes a  _come hither_  motion.

 

 

All this because Mark’s girl sold him out.

“Don’t get attached,” Ten says in a way styled to address idiots, jittering on the splice of exhaustion. In his thighs, down his back, it’s all pinched in tweezers.

Mark spits out mucus and stress, chalking down the white wall in a butchered landing. “Gimme a break,” he mumbles.

On the far back edge of Ten’s grin, someone who’s not looking like leftovers. Ten one-knees hard and picks up Mark’s cold gun on the rise, levelling his frame of perspective from behind the pillar. And shoots.

A suit with a person in it ragdolls to the oily ground, spritzing blood from the collar.

Lazy to stir, Mark guts free of his nonchalant position. He unballs his arms and torso from cement to full-sized and like that sidles up on watery legs to the bleeding curiosity. His stride breaks into a run. Mark skids to all fours.   

“He’s one of ours,” Mark screams back in Ten’s direction, echoing. Trying to stop the bleeding the way he’s doing, making his hands into a necklace, it makes him look like he’s testing the pulse. “He’s—help me with the—Ten, his—”

Must’ve been the backup M had mentioned. Ten rakes the hair out of his face and tries to listen for his own breath. It comes at a slight lag.

Stalking in and out the stacks of bodies on wheels so sleek he sees his reflection, Ten tries the nearest one and violates an alarm into blaring. Here, he’s here. He moves on to the next, elbows the window and resuscitates it through cable sparkwork. Mark is still talking when he skidmarks in front of him with the passenger door yawned open.

“Get in,” Ten says.

Shocked out of shape, Mark is shiny with blood and his eyes are like a boy’s, and he is, he is still.

 

 

When they’re back on British soil, Mark dresses it up as an other-side field casualty, but he doesn’t blink once during.

 

* * *

 

“Repeated exposure to the source of your trauma is the opposite of what you ought to be doing.” 

“The source is dead.”

“Not to you.” 

Ten glares emmental holes into his soft, waxy face. Says, after not letting himself be bogged down by the cons, “Have you been having afternoon tea party chit-chats with Q?”

Qian’s eyebrows zoom up. “Have you?”

A daft split-second has him wondering if his prior loneliness was partly on Qian, and he discards the notion immediately.

“In a manner of speaking,” Ten says even though it’s squat of Qian’s business; even though there is, in fact, no business to speak of. Through his custom nitpicking, he determines the worth of Qian’s cinematic shutter-change of facials as just below erotic.

All the same, he admits that may have been a bit rash on his part.

“I’ve not known you to be this willingly extracurricular in a good,” Qian says, fascinated as ever, “while. Well done.” 

Ten’s cuticles feel prim. 

Qian sobers elegantly like a switch. His body language artificially loosens and he’s saying, “That said, I’d now like—and I think it’s not astronomical of me—I’d like for you briefly to talk about Jaemin.”

 

* * *

 

When Ten waltzes in, the 006 badge is unassuming as they get on the table.

Nothing tilts and nothing waits for him. The plaque winks light like new, spit-shine pristine. These things only ever get seen properly when someone’s properly dead.

M is blabbering on, and in the middle of this or that, Ten says: “I don’t want it.”

With the sense of being herded, M pauses and looks at the table. Looks at Ten.

“Oh, it’s not for you.”

As though someone’s shaken his blood fizzy, Ten crawls inside with pressure that cuts off at his throat. He waits for M’s thought to continue. It doesn’t.  

“What are you doing here?” he asks Seo, stood long and apathetic, who has newly become dependent on an interpreter.

“He’s been promoted,” M says.

 

* * *

 

This time, it’s a headshot.

Q is there.

 

 

Naked, maybe Q’s flat could rival Ten’s in acreage, but it’s so homely he feels suffocated under a doughy, pliant pillow. His patchy floorboards complain when from the windowsill Ten shifts about what feels like Q himself projected, along a fat couch with moccasins for feet and only one cushion, walls taped over with paintings printed like avant-garde posters.

It’s all hectically pouring into each other, no real ends or beginnings, hooking him in. He toes twice into books laid places too obscure not to remind him of the swapping game people have at the Tube.

Q, waterlogged in moonlight, is stirring tea when he rounds into the living room. He sees Ten and jerks and spills, spewing things so dirty Ten is taken.

“You do have the pottier mouth, after all,” Ten says, and he’s disappointed Q is too preoccupied with sucking his fingers to multitask. He sets the mug down. It steams like pulled cotton.

Q’s nothing says much and emphatically.

“I was in the neighbourhood,” Ten answers.

“Are you injured?”

“No.”

“Then what—”

“What is that?”

“What? My cat.”

“Hideous.”

The thing looks like a lumber beard with one beady grape for an eye trying to navigate a horizontal world vertically. It ropes between Q’s ankles, so swollen it might benefit from antihistamines.

“It’s sizing me up.”

“Her name is Karenina, and don’t be stupid.”

Tracking the wet compass of Q’s pyjamas, Ten steps close enough to be informal.

Closer yet. Q’s unflinching doubt when he grabs his hands by the veins in the backs of them, sticky-full inside like gluten, it shows. Ten rubs one against his cheek and it’s so pathetic, so unlike what he is, but Q lets him.

“Did you burn yourself?” Ten asks.

Above it all, Karenina meows and tumbleweeds toward the lit-up rectangle of the kitchen.

Because Q observes strippingly well, and maybe that’s part of what bagged him his job so effortlessly, Ten reverts to his training. Without his glasses, his eyes splat so molten they look spooked, and without his glasses, there’s nothing to dig Ten’s eye out when he crowds cheek-to-cheek, sliding. His nose crooks with it and dips its sigh just under Q’s jaw.

Ten spends time in that neck. In that forward-pinched waist, ribs pushing.

They press. He preens under—finally, finally—Q’s hand. It scuffs down the cropped of his scalp just right, compacting him into Q’s rail arms and overbig joints.

“You’re told what you need to know when you need to know it,” Q sounds like a chainsaw this up close. He thumbs over Ten’s piercings with pulling force. “Take it from me. M would trust you with his life.”

“M wouldn’t trust me to dogsit his pet.” 

Q falters for a blink only. “And nobody in their right mind should.”

Calmly Ten takes his face and upends it from the jaw, putting his mouth on the lean, deboned underside until the skin strains into tendons. Q’s ass fits in his hands, and he listens to what deep pockets Q’s lungs make for when they work overtime, more. Louder.  

“You were right,” Ten mumbles a clammy path back over the cliff of Q’s chin, talking over his mouth. “It was a rat.”

Q locks up bodylong, just bone.

Ten asks, “Do you even know?”

“How—” 

“I listened. Then I broke into his office,” Ten explains, and upon Q’s lips’ unclamming, he licks lazy across them by half.

He drags his mouth until he kneels, nosing Q’s belly. Under his touch it curdles, and Ten scratches the flimsy wrapping paper of Q’s pyjamas down his hips.

Making one-handed work of his gun holster, he clacks it on the floor and he nudges it mouthfirst next to the bookshelf that’s just scaffolding metal. This time, Q watches it for what it is and, Finally _,_  Ten thinks, something I don’t have.

But Q has many of those, his own type of deprivation among them.

“Needy,” Ten warns through another pull.

Blinking, Q gentles the knuckle-deep comb in Ten’s hair to something civilly rooted, tempering until it’s simple unbuckled closeness. His gut is talking when he marionettes Q onto the couch over the floorboards’ crowing.

Only blood makes him this warm. That’s what he’ll miss in the event of joining scraps when his use and desirability expire—not being warm.

The inside of Q’s thighs looks elastic as Ten crowbars them away from each other farther than they care to by design. Seeing him half-hard like this pricks Ten’s spine and makes him look. Q’s chin lifts as steep as his lids dip low, chest an up-and-down wave, and Ten has to laugh.

What fools, the both of them.   

Like he hasn’t eaten yet, he leaves so much drool and bites Q all through the nonverbal complaints at its cold dry-down; the jumpy muscle, the kettle inhale. The soft hairs on his thighs bristle the more Ten avoids them. Q’s cock is pointing accusation of neglect at him.

Along the creases of Q’s hips, he ensures it pinks, but the dark won’t tell. He’s steadied then, a hand of crawling insect legs, and he almost forgot Q was there. Like a guest to his own pleasure, in delayed shamelessness he helps himself to fucking Ten’s mouth just so, dangling out slides of spit on the downstroke. Languidly massaging, Ten slicks it against Q’s balls.

“No sugar,” Q rasps, sounding freshly jarred awake, and could’ve fooled him.

Ten wonders if he’s referring to his goddamn tea, the one he’s not making and the one he tells Q he’s not making. What he gets is a condescending pat on the head.

Inching, Q forces at his neck with no true direction, but Ten navigates the urge the moment it presents. Kneecaps crisped to nutshells, he goes so full he lets himself gag, nose stabbed through Q’s belly. Q moans and Ten coughs again, holding deeper, holding his breath until his body panics. High on spongy lightness, his cock twitches into nothing, and it’s not just his body that dulls.

So slowly, he sits his throat stiff and mouth lockjawed through the slide off. From the root of Ten’s humming tongue down, it milks pulses of pre-come that stretch low, stringing against his chin. He continues the motion by jacking Q lazy, licking into the tip.

To the slick sounds, Q is fucked out haywire, and Ten has never been more curious to push to a build-up and pull back when it’s least fair just to hear something sweet and have Q ache. 

 

 

“You don’t even have a name,” Q says inhumanly early in the morning, suckling pensive through the blister of his beverage. From the tunnel in his armpit, Karenina is transmitting something venomous. “You ever think about that?”

“What?”

“You’re your job, and that’s all you are. Do you?”

Yes; Q is pointier, sits up straighter. Thinks, perhaps, he’s the dramatic exception to people’s wee-hour misanthropy and beyond, because of course he does.      

Ten finishes chewing. “Be a darling,” he nods to the salt and breaks up the next syllables like a cookie, “Quartermaster.”

He’s called in and leaves half an hour from then. Lukewarm, Q surveys from the doorway.

 

* * *

  

It always smells like a mop by the pool and feels like the inside of a wet toaster. The water of Ten’s body squeezes out on his skin and slicks him to go friendlier with the environment. He smacks his way to the lone middle, watching the jellyfish undulation of the lanes denoted on the bottom. On the last tiled step, he arrows in.

Under the cold plunge, he feels a shed of skin. The chlorine stabs his back all over again, burning the most on the far flex of muscle the more he marinates, the farther he sloshes.

Even still as a stone, he’d still float with a grab of air in his mouth. Three laps it takes to prune his fingertips and seven more to reach his brain. Ten suspends himself without kinetic purpose and feels an ant, the single non-thing jumbled with the lisping imprints of people that come to this place to leave things here.

Like that hairy spider of black mould that eats up more of the tiling each time Ten stops and stares from the water.   

All lights snuff.

Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack.

Ten blinks and the world changes none. Dipped, he still has no weight and his neckache grows in importance without seeing. In the stuffy echo, his twist around rocks purls through the water.

From his nine o’clock leaps a body-sized pulse of infrared signature. Smacksmacksmacking close and it’s running hot, a snowman composed of peonies of heat. Over the lip of the pool, it splashes in.

 

 

“Hello?”

“0010 reporting for duty. Jung is dead.”

Ten chucks his goggles. His stomach is runny. His eyeballs are sticky. He’s blinking off the strain hoovering them in through the back of his head.

The other end of the call crumples like aluminium foil, and then Q seems closer at once.

“You didn’t try to shoot him dead, did you?”

On the pale tile, a garrotte flattens in a capillaried red curl. Some of it carries leftovers like used dental floss. A beat, and he admits, “No.”

“Thank God. You did a botch job of those tests.”

Ten’s chin tastes of germless water. Cooling down, cooling quite below, his body is just little pin pricks, skin plugs scalped of their feathers.  

“Are you all right?” Q asks, but what he asks is,  _Bleeding out? Mortally wounded and wasting your last precious seconds on bravado, you prat_ — 

“Q.” 

A tense, “0010.”

“I’m all right.” He looks to his left. “Though I did ruin your lenses.” 

“Lovely,” Q says, and Ten thinks someone’s smiling. “I’ll be sure to send you the bill.”

**Author's Note:**

> [♪♫♬](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsG2M-uNUX4)


End file.
